Research suggests Legere is singlehandedly dragging some customers away from rivals

John Legere might literally be the first — and likely last — American telecom CEO to have his own personality cult. Research firm Comlinkdata has analyzed 2.7 million of social media messages posted on Twitter for the past three years of people who said that they were switching to a rival carrier and found that “John Legere” was one of the more commonly cited reasons for people switching from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

“Interestingly, John Legere’s full name appears in every carrier’s word cloud except T-Mobile’s,” Comlinkdata writes. “For those unfamiliar, John Legere is the CEO of T-Mobile known for his taunting tweets and on-stage antics. John Legere joined Twitter a little over one year ago and has clearly played a role in the buying decisions of wireless consumers. Some people on Twitter even mention him as being the sole purpose for switching to T-Mobile.”

Legere’s oft-amusing and profane diatribes against his rivals have definitely added some needed spice to the wireless telecom market, which for years has been a mind-numbingly boring industry that’s thrived on prepackaged soundbites and prepared statements. And while we personally wouldn’t switch to a carrier just because of its CEO, switching because of John Legere seems to make marginally more sense than switching because of Lowell McAdam or Randall Stephenson.